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Didi Tang

BEIJING | Four men already had been convicted of murder in southeastern China when a fifth person confessed to the crime. But when lawyers demanded to review case documents to clear the men's names, the court stonewalled. So the lawyers unfurled banners outside the venue.

They protested for days, alongside social activists who insulted the top judge, and uploaded pictures online.

BEIJING (AP) — The 10,000 doves released in a ceremony Wednesday for China's National Day underwent unusual scrutiny, each having its feathers and anus checked for dangerous materials, state-run media reports said, reflecting government jitters over possible attacks.

The symbols of peace were released at sunrise in Beijing's symbolic heart of Tiananmen Square in a ceremony for the Oct. 1 holiday to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

BEIJING— As a ninth-grader, Shanghai’s Li Sixin spent more than three hours on homework a night and took tutorials in math, physics and chemistry on the weekends. When she was tapped to take an exam last year given to half a million students around the world, Li breezed through it.

“I felt the test was just easy,” said Li, who was a student at Shanghai Wenlai Middle School at the time and now attends high school. “The science part was harder... but I can handle that.”

QIYAN COMMUNITY, China — After her husband started making good money as an electrician here in central China, Cao Qin ended years of working as a migrant laborer hundreds of kilometers (miles) away and came back home to better care for their school-age boy.

But Cao, 30, didn't return to the family's rugged adobe home in the hills. Instead, they all moved into a new third-floor apartment in this planned community of Qiyan that has been going up in a valley in southern Shaanxi province over the past couple of years as a new home for villagers scattered throughout nearby mountains.

BEIJING — The mother of a Chinese baby boy who was rescued from a sewer pipe beneath a restroom shortly after birth is unlikely to face criminal charges because authorities concluded he fell into the toilet accidentally, local officials and media reports said Thursday.

The baby was released from a hospital to his maternal grandparents late Wednesday, while his 22-year-old mother remains under medical care, the state-run Jinhua Evening News reported, in an account confirmed by a local police official who declined to give his name.

BEIJING — The mother of the Chinese newborn trapped in a sewer pipe in a stunning ordeal caught on video had raised the initial alarm and was present for the entire two-hour rescue but did not admit giving birth until confronted by police, reports said Wednesday.

The state-run, Hangzhou-based newspaper Dushikuaibao said police became suspicious when they found baby toys and blood-stained toilet paper in the 22-year-old woman’s rented room in the building where Saturday’s rescue occurred in eastern China.

BEIJING (AP) — A powerful earthquake struck the steep hills of China's southwestern Sichuan province on Saturday, leaving at least 156 people dead and more than 5,500 injured, nearly five years after a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region.

BEIJING — Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery in the world, archaeologists say.

The findings, which will appear in the journal Science on Friday, add to recent efforts that have dated pottery piles in east Asia to more than 15,000 years ago, refuting conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the period about 10,000 years ago when humans moved from being hunter-gathers to farmers.